E. J. Dionne Jr has some concerns about Ben Bernanke's nomination as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and expresses them in this Washington Post column: No Job for an Ideologue You'd hope that the new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board would learn not only from Alan Greenspan's successes but also from his failures. There is reason to worry that having a Fed chairman so … [Read more...] about E. J. Dionne on Ben Bernanke

See here for my update, along with new images. StormTrack: "Surface pressures of the Mid-Atlantic are dropping steadily as Hurricane Wilma continues to gain strength. The latest advisory lists Wilma as a strong Category 3 hurricane with sustained winds of 125 mph and a central pressure of 959 mb. Wilma is racing northeast at 47 mph. That is very very very fast for a … [Read more...] about Hurricane Wilma heads north

According to Zogby, President Bush's approval rating is back up to 45%: President Bush, his job approval rating beleaguered by poor marks in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, rebounded from historic lows this summer to 45% in Zogby International’s latest poll, with job approval numbers bumping back up into the range where they have hovered for most of his second term. The … [Read more...] about Zogby on Bush’s “bounce”

More unsightly image problems for Vice President Dick Cheney...this time in the Plamegate scandal....but whether this is illegal or not remains to be seen:WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 - I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity … [Read more...] about Plamegate Discussions Went Up The Cheney Of Command

Here's the latest from Wall Street Poet Michael Silverstein:Supreme Court Angst When our votes got you elected, There were things that we expected, With the high court's new decisions, We were promised big revisions. For appointments we made clear, On the bench what we hold dear, Judges who with God are chummy, Not another lib'ral dummy. Justices who would deposit, All them … [Read more...] about Supreme Court Nomination Poetry

Is the other (elephantine-sized) shoe now slowly dropping in the ongoing saga of President George Bush's generally-panned nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court? With each passing day, the trend certainly seems to increasingly point towards a bleak or historically unenthusiastic endgame for GWB's lawyer, whose selection sparked howls of protests from many … [Read more...] about New Concrete Signs That Miers Nomination Is Doomed?

Yahoo! News has the story from Channel 4 in Detroit.Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks has died, Local 4 has learned. Parks, 92, reportedly died around 7 p.m. Monday at St. John Hospital on Detroit's east side. Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 landed her in jail and sparked a bus boycott that is considered the start of the … [Read more...] about Rosa Parks, 92, Passes Away

My thoughts on blogger influence, past, present, and future. It also includes a reprisal of my "blogger code of the ethics," which runs as follows: 1) I will not be a partisan hack, nor will I engage in hatchet jobs on my political opponents that are grounded weakly or not at all in facts. 2) I will focus predominantly on issues, not personal lives or other tangents. While … [Read more...] about Pumping the Blogger Ego

Latest set of polling has a lot of bad news for the GOP, and just as much good news for Democrats. 2006 could be 1994 all over again (except without a victory by the forces of darkness). … [Read more...] about Poll Watching

FBI Papers Indicate Intelligence Violations; Secret Surveillance Lacked Oversight By Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writer The FBI has conducted clandestine surveillance on some U.S. residents for as long as 18 months at a time without proper paperwork or oversight, according to previously classified documents to be released today. Records turned over as part of a Freedom … [Read more...] about WP: FBI Probes Lacked Oversight

Today's NPR Talk of the Nation (TOTN) - Guests were Former Sen. John Danforth, Rep. Thomas Tancredo (R-CO) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) Faith-based initiatives, school vouchers — and now the Harriet Miers nomination. President Bush speaks often about the role of religion in his life, and translates that into public policy. We discuss religion and politics. … [Read more...] about Mixing Politics and Faith in the White House

Breaking news: President Bush nominated today Ben S. Bernanke, his top economic adviser, to replace Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Calling Mr. Bernanke the "right man to build on the record that Alan Greenspan has established," Mr. Bush emphasized the nominee's "record of excellence as both an academic and policy maker." He spoke at the White House … [Read more...] about BERNANKE TO SUCCEED GREENSPAN

On a lighter (maybe) note, there's been another Sign of the Apocalypse: Cameron Diaz lecturing at Stanford. How exactly does this contribute to academic excellence? … [Read more...] about Professor Cameron Diaz

And prepares to head up the East Coast (click image to expand). For all the latest, see StormTracker's update: Overnight Wilma has strengthened into a major hurricane, despite having a large and ragged eye... Satellite imagery indicates that Wilma has been weakening over land. (Not that this comes as a surprise.) However, Wilma's eye remains intact which could allow for … [Read more...] about Hurricane Wilma smashes through Florida

Taking a short break from the politics of the day: This site (from Australia, the first line of which is, "Welcome to my site about the Energia Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle (HLLV). ) makes a compelling case for the superiority of the Energia/Buran system over the US Space Shuttle. The only improvement I can see would be in putting the Buran shuttle on the top of the stack rather … [Read more...] about Lost opportunities

UPDATED ON TUESDAY MORNING: A Special Report from The Toledo Blade: PART I: Ohio, California take divisive redistricting wars to ballot box Voters in California and Ohio, two states with rich histories of gerrymandering, could bulldoze the national political balance this fall if they decide to write politicians out of the redistricting business... PART II: Complex reforms … [Read more...] about Redistricting Wars

Joe did a great round-up yesterday (see below). For those of you who are interested, I've also got the second part of my Miers Withdrawal Watch at The Reaction. Check it out. I won't repost the whole MWW2, but here's my reaction to George Will's latest critique of the Miers nomination in The Washington Post: I'm hardly a conservative critic of the Miers nomination, but Will … [Read more...] about Miers Withdrawal Watch — Part 2

(Cross-posted at The Reaction.) Thanks to Steve Clemons at The Washington Note, we have this: Jeffrey Goldberg has written a critique in The New Yorker of the Bush White House that equals Ron Suskind's devastating critique of Bush before the last election titled "Without a Doubt." In "Breaking Ranks: What Turned Brent Scowcroft Against the Bush Administration?", Jeffrey … [Read more...] about Brent Scowcroft on George W. Bush

...here at The Moderate Voice, an interesting analysis of the "house effects" titled "Which way do polls lean?" is well worth reading. A second, longer discussion can be found at this link, with the following listed as the conclusions: Specific polls do appear to have consistent biases on specific questions. The amount of lean can exceed the nominal MoE (margin of error), … [Read more...] about Since opinion polls tend to be a topic of discussion…

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has long harbored aspirations to make the move up from Congress to the White House, but the ongoing SEC investigation into his sale of hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock in a company run by his brother is casting a shadow on these ambitions. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum's front page article in tomorrow's issue of The Washington Post does little … [Read more...] about Frist’s Stock Problems Cast Doubt on Presidential Ambitions